Some claim that taglines are becoming obsolete.

I read a post by Nicola Ziady a few days ago titled, “Hospital Taglines – Are they Dead?”. In the article, Nicola referenced an Adweek article that claimed that taglines are not as frequently used or as important as they were in the past.

“There’s certainly evidence that taglines have diminished in importance. Many of the most admired brands—Starbucks, Whole Foods, Lululemon, Nordstrom—don’t have them. Some brands whose taglines helped propel them to greatness no longer use them. Apple hasn’t used “Think different” for years.”

The articles continued to state that “in today’s media, the most common advertising real estate is a small mobile phone screen, and much of a brand’s verbal messaging is constrained by a 140-character limit or six seconds of video. A tagline would dominate communication in these formats and crowd out the brand logo or the ad-specific message.”

Nicola continued to list taglines used in hospital examples. You can find the alphabetical list on Junto .

I thought that it would be fun to see what is happening in world of taglines for medical devices companies and pharma companies. Perhaps you can use such a list as reference and for inspiration.

Medical Devices Companies and Pharma Companies Taglines

We used the top 40 medical device company list from MDDI and the top 40 pharma companies as listed in Pharma Board Room. For most, we found taglines through a simple internet search using Google Image Search (inserting [company name] AND logo in the search box). We used the MBA Skool brand guide in cases where we couldn’t find the tagline via the simple Google search, above. Note that a few of the main medical device companies are not pure medical device players; their taglines were not medically oriented. There were a few cases where we couldn’t find a tagline for one of the companies. In these cases, we wrote NA. Feel free to let us know if we have missed anything!

Our findings: From this small sample, it turns out that taglines are not regularly used by medical companies on the web.

Do you still need a tagline for your medical company?

There doesn’t seem to be a straight answer here, yet it seems that the medical companies appearing on the lists don’t typically use taglines in their websites. If you are not working at one of the top 40 medical device or pharma companies named above that has an established brand name, you are probably a medtech entrepreneur or working in one of the thousands of small or midsized medtech firms that hopes to be large one day. If this is the case, a tagline could be used as a differentiator from the competition, and as a way to stand out. A tagline will help to immediately peg your product’s attributes and benefits.